This year’s letter from the Executive Director began as follows:
At 4:08 a.m. on the morning of May 27, I authored and sent an email to Aspen Public Radio’s interim News Director, Halle Zander, that I can honestly say I had never imagined I would ever be in a position to send:
Dear Halle, The following information is embargoed until approximately 6am MT this morning, Tuesday, May 27, 2025. I will notify you as soon as the suit has been filed and we are cleared to share the information publicly…
Attached was an embargoed copy of the legal complaint Aspen Public Radio would be filing in a matter of hours, alongside co-plaintiffs National Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio, and KSUT Public Radio in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, against Donald J. Trump, in his official capacity as President of the United States. Just a few weeks before, he had authored Executive Order 14290, violating the constitutional rights and editorial independence of public radio stations across the country.
It will forever be a low-point, and a high-point, of my career. In July, the efforts to silence America’s public media system continued when the Rescissions Act of 2025 was passed by Congress to take back $1.1 billion in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). In response, the station launched a Resiliency Fund to secure critical financial support to cover new costs and replace the $210,000 of annual CPB support the station had unexpectedly lost —after fifty years of bipartisan Congressional support. (On December 31, we announced the station had exceeded our goal to raise $500,000.)
Each week, over 18,000 radio listeners tune in to Aspen Public Radio to hear the news of the day, be informed, nourished, inspired, and entertained.
Click here to review the Aspen Public Radio 2025 Impact Report.
Our public media service is free and available to all, and will continue to be, because of the hundreds of individuals and families, organization and businesses, foundations and local governments who have decided to invest in this public radio station. To support local journalism, free access to fact-based news and information, civic dialogue, critical discourse, the sharing of new ideas, and to be relentlessly curious about the world and how we can make it better.
I am so grateful to everyone who has contributed to create what you hear on Aspen Public Radio, explored on our website, and experienced with us in person:
- 18,000 weekly listeners to Aspen Public Radio
- 25,500 users, 40,000 sessions, 45,800 pageviews each month to aspenpublicradio.org
- 1,034 members, with 618 of those monthly Evergreen members, who made a contribution
- 114 businesses & organizations supported the station as underwriters
- and hundreds and hundreds of attendees came to our public events.
And as a community radio station, we are committed to lifting up your voices. We had the opportunity to record 99 public events in 2024, produced by amazing community partners, who secured permissions for us to archive them on our website as “Ideas, Speakers & Lectures” for you to explore, broadcasting 32 of them as Sunday Specials.
We also brought you 40 live and special broadcasts from local events including Aspen Gay Ski Week, World Cup Men’s Downhill, the Food & Wine Classic, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen Security Forum, Plein Air Art Festival and Festival de Rancho at Anderson Ranch —along with a summer full of Aspen Music Festival and School Sunday afternoon concerts.
We produced 8 amazing events in 2024, and 10 in 2025 –including Squirm Nights for Aspen Mayor and City Council, the Women’s Desk Launch at The Little Nell, the Climate Desk Launch at the Aspen Ideas Festival, another remarkable Backcountry Symposium and Nonprofit Volunteer Fair, meaningful donor events with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly and at the 2025 Aspen Film Festival, and hosted the wildly successful inaugural Frontiers of Knowledge symposium in partnership with the Wheeler Opera House.
On the air, our talented team of journalists showed up for live newscasts every weekday, produced the daily Local Newscast podcast, and covered so many remarkable stories with feature radio work, alongside producing 321 local digital news stories in 2024. They also brought home 8 journalism awards for work done in 2024, including Top Honors from Colorado Broadcasters Association, Society of Professional Journalists, and the Edward R. Murrow Awards Competition.
In September we held our annual Fall Listener Survey asking listeners to tell us how we can best serve their news and information needs and grow Aspen Public Radio as a leading public broadcast journalism service on Colorado’s western slope. Over 432 of you responded, our highest response rate yet(!), and select survey highlights are published as part of this annual Impact Report.
As we approach new challenges alongside age-old battles, let’s look to 2026 for another year of coming together around the radio each day, attending amazing community convenings, celebrating outdoor exploration, and joyfully tackling the unique opportunities we know are awaiting us and will deepen our relationships with each other.
Breeze Richardson
Executive Director, Aspen Public Radio